I had planned to start running all of my “Tips” posts in the EMC Developer Network, but I wanted to editorialize a little in this Tip, so I’ve decided to throw it up here. This issue arose when I installed a new repository into an existing environment. It is a documented issue, though the Support guys need to read that documentation a little more closely.
Data Shack
Tips: Don’t Depend on That Sequential Object ID
I recently ran into a situation that challenged one of my basic beliefs in the setup of the Documentum repository, object ids may not be sequential!!!
What you say? Impossible you say? Yet it happened.
What I encountered isn’t a widespread phenomenon, but it could happen to you.
What Happened
Old Documentum Architecture Habits are Hard to Break
A while back, John Kominetz wrote a nice post on The Elephant and the Blind Man. I’ve been checking John out for a while and been looking for an excuse to link to his stuff for a while, but I always get sidetracked. Aside from his fun habit to reference Douglas Adams, he has been working with Documentum for a very long time. He has developed a healthy skepticism about the product.
In his post on the Elephant, John talks about the load of Junk DNA in Documentum. As the product has evolved over the last 15 years, things have been left behind and other things that worked, haven’t evolved. My recent post on the Audit Trail has led to a couple of posts addressing both of these aspects.
Tips: Taming the Documentum Audit Trail
The Documentum Audit Trail. It is one of the un-tamed beasts in many Documentum deployments. The requirements for auditing often come into conflict with the reality of the out-of-the-box functionality. To makes things useful for the average user, organizations tend to set earlier than desired audit purges and/or severely restrict what they audit which can lead to important actions being overlooked.
On the other hand, keeping everything makes finding what you want an expensive proposition.
Word of Pie 